The Rhizomatic West: Representing the American West in a Transnational, Global, Media Age

Conclusion: On "The Crystal Frontier"

299 CONCLUSION On “The Crystal Frontier” There’s a little bit of the West in all of us. Wrangler jeans commercial The world that is best is the most “multiple,” the most virtual. John Rajchman The quotation mark points not only inward but outward as well. Susan Stewart Western Folies Jean-François Lyotard’s postmodern experimental text Pacific Wall begins with a description of the University of California, San Diego library as a “transparent jewel” with its “walls of glass” pointing in all directions , both “internal” and “external,” radiating both total vision and knowledge “without problem or hindrance.” However, his narrator goes on to think more about this elaborate crystal grid as a “maze” or labyrinth whose refractions and angles draw the eye away from the books, “behind the western face,” from inside to outside and back again, until “it begins to jump from one to the other, and the suspicion arises you’ve been had. And that getting in or out is impossible for the precise reason there is no in or out.” In fact, the narrator argues, this strange dialogic relationship “traces new passages in this web of words and things. You’re adding something to the labyrinth.” Inside this maze of mirror -like refractions and despite the “quality of its classifying system,” the narrator reads (like us) a text that is itself “a collection of . . . approximations , far-fetched metaphors, unexpected linkages, gross errors and misconceptions, and delirious reasonings,” believing he might be able to “restore its readability.” In this multifaceted description Lyotard comes closest to understanding the kind of West I have suggested in this book: a complex discursive space that appears transparent, clearly represented and archived in a thousand canonical texts of history, literature, film, photography, art, geography, and every other form, and yet as one looks closer within this apparent clarity other forces emerge, spilling out and provoking “new passages” and connections to be made. This, to conclusion 300 me, is the position of anyone attempting to comprehend the American West, to “restore its readability” and fix its meanings. The consequence of this process is, however, not to produce a coherent metatext that explains and defines its object of study but rather something closer to the rhizomatic endeavor I have traced across the preceding chapters, an intricate architecture always “adding something to the labyrinth” through what Mark C. Taylor terms a “riot of supplements.”1 Despite the spatial grids defined in the “absolute West,” as Lyotard terms it—the library block, the stacks of books, the California cities like “a checkers game,” with “highways [and] squares marked off,” and those who “survey and allot . . . organizing, delimiting” space—there are counterforces simultaneously at work in a “relentless undoing of established patterns and combinations.”2 In fact, at America’s western edge, Lyotard’s “Pacific Wall,” settlement and rootedness are always potentially unstable, the region an “island of forgetting,” “temporary montages, precarious products of cultural bricolage soon to be swept away,” and what remains is an “always-displaced serenity” or “unbearable” mobility. In contrast, according to Lyotard’s narrator, when “a culture starts to coagulate” and become “rooted” it “ceases to be West,” since in his precarious and mobile sense of westness its spaces must be “continuously replotted” and “undecidable,” added to with “excess” and “surplus” because “a surplus rebuffs any attempt to construct coordinates.”3 These spatial-architectural concepts take us back to where I began in the introduction, discussing how one might see Rem Koolhaas’s critical quest for the “delirious” within the modernist grids of New York as a model for comprehending the West as a space in constant tension between mythic coherence and arrant mobility. In Lyotard’s West the initial impression is of controlled structures and the “safety of sameness,” whereas within the refractory folds and crystallized, prismatic forms of the library there exists something “more Piranesian than Mondrianesque ” in which one can “assume the traces of an ungriddable space” within the apparently “homogeneous gridded space.”4 This represents the layered, “baroque” West always breaking out of the containing grids of definition, fixity, national certitude, and mythic closure, a labyrinthine West that refuses to be any single thing and which I wish to further address in this final section with a return to the abstract poetics of ar- on “the crystal frontier” 301 chitecture and the apparently rather more prosaic experience of popular music...